"Slime Ascension" is a short game for the Playdate console, made for PlayJam 8.
https://uguu-org.itch.io/slime-ascension
When the theme of "ascension" was decided, I thought I would make a climbing game, the kind that jumps from platform to platform. It's the most obvious thing that came to mind, and I was confident that this was something I could finish in three days.
The first thing I did was add "In the Hall of the Mountain King" as the background music, since that's the first song that came to mind when I think of "ascension". I thought this choice was just as obvious as my platform climbing idea, but whereas at least two other entries also did a platform climbing thing, nobody chose this song as their background music. Having added this song, I did not do any more audio work on this project, except on the third day where I fixed the clock.
After the background music, the next thing I did was drawing the player avatar and implementing all the movements. Since the avatar I drew was a blob/slime thing, this project now has the title of "Slime Ascension". All this was done on the first day.
The second day was spent on drawing and implementing the platforms. First I decided the sizes of the areas where the player can stand on, and then drew large sprites that roughly covered those shapes. At run time, the platforms are drawn as large sprites from back to front. The most interesting part of the platforms was probably the placements, which was done by creating a ghost that jumps in a random direction from the highest platform, then place the new platform a few pixels below the apex. This guarantees that new platforms are always reachable regardless of how much I tweaked the player's velocities. There is also some bit of heuristics to keep the platforms sorted, but most of the platform logic was straightforward, I probably spent more time messing with Inkscape filters than I did on platform code. Anyways, by the end of the second day, I had a playable game that did what I set out to do.
The third day was a day of feature creep and bug fixes. Actually the one feature creep was the addition of falling meteors that would knock the players off from where they are standing, or push the player off of their trajectory if they were in flight. You can tell this was a last day feature that didn't get enough testing, and turns out those rocks hit much harder than I had planned. That was very unfortunate, but other than that my jam entry had most of the things I wanted.
The first thing I did was make the rocks not hit as hard, and added an option to turn them off entirely. I thought that was the most critical fix, plus all the packaging stuff that I didn't have time to do.
The remainder of the week was in implementing other features, including more interesting routes, springs, movable platforms, and tilt control. The tilt control thing I was especially happy about since it means the game is now playable one-handed. I see that many other entries made use of accelerometer and I just had not thought of it when I originally implemented the game, although I am happy that I went with crank controls first since it's more difficult to get the jump timing right when there is no explicit jump command.
Graphically, the game looks almost the same as the jam version, except the background is now drawn with a single color based on the average of all visible platforms. This removes the hard edge transitions that were visible in the jam version. The background is actually a single rectangle with 8x8 patterns, and all the scrolling is done by scrolling the pattern. Because the background can go completely black, the slime now comes with a thin white outline, and height display text inverts color based on background.
I announced the new version to the usual places:
This jam was another 3 day event right after ICFPc 2025, but not nearly as much stress. I am fairly happy with how things turned out, I had fun making it and lots of fun playing everyone else's entries. It was time well spent.
Previous (2025-09-08): ICFPc 2025